Your old
philosophers
Beheld mankind, as mere spectators of
The Olympic games. When I behold a prize
Worth wrestling for, I may be found a Milo.
[Lord Byron The Deformed Transformed part II, ii, 55-58]

‘What then will
be the right way to live? A man should spend his whole life “at play”’. Plato
The Laws VII 803.

‘I [Wisdom – Sophia]
was with him forming all things and was delighted every day, playing before him
at all times. Playing in the world and my delights were to be with the children
of men’ Proverbs VIII, 30]

‘Struggle and the joy of victory were recognised—and nothing so
distinguishes the Greek world from ours as much as the colouring, so derived,
of individual ethical concepts, for example Eris and envy.’ Nietzsche Homer’s
Contest.

Napoleon
is supposed to have said at the end of his life: ‘il n’y a que deux puissances
dans le monde , le sabre et l’esprit…à la longue, le sabre est toujours battu
par l’esprit’ (‘there are only two forces in the world, the sword and the
spirit, and in the end, the sword is always conquered by the spirit.’) At the
end of his life, Lord Byron took up the sword in order to awake and to serve
the spirit of Greece. He was a man of the sword and was, and is, more
powerfully, a spirit. Hero and poet. He was also a scholar of languages
including Greek and knew that words have histories.

My
talk today has been translated into Greek by Professor Byron Raizis and it will
come out a little differently despite Byron Raizis’s brilliance as a
translator. ‘Spirit’, for instance, is ‘pneuma’ in Greek. This key word for the
conference has a complex history. For the ancient Greeks, pneuma was not
immaterial but, as it were, something diaphanous, breath, wind, but still
material in some sense. You could not use it, for instance, of the dead and it
was not as high a word as psyche, soul. But then the Hebrew Bible was
translated into Greek in Alexandria, and the word chosen to translate the
Hebrew word ruakh was pneuma. Ruakh itself originally meant something material
but it had become applied to the inner life of man and of the available terms,
it was the highest; nephesh, a kindred word was a lower term and it was this
word that became translated as psyche. The Septuagint was, of course, the text
of the Old Testament used as a reference throughout the New Testament, hence
when St Paul meditates on the human person, he produces an opposition between
living in, for, and by the spirit, pneuma, rather than the flesh, sarx, which
would not have been possible for an Ancient Greek. In the same way, St Paul thinks of the human person as made up of body (soma), soul (psyche) and spirit
(pneuma). ‘Spirit’ is now the highest word of the three and lends itself to
extended metaphoric use. It is this extended sense that becomes general via
Christianity. Napoleon therefore, without thinking too hard about it, could
elevate the power of the ‘spirit’ above the sword. Hence it is that we, too,
can talk meaningfully about ‘the Olympic Spirit’ just as Byron had a similar
usage when talking in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ( 888) of ‘The
Glorious Spirit of the Grecian Muse’ or when he says of Haidee’s father,
Lambro, in Canto III (434) of Don Juan:

But something of the spirit of old Greece

Flash'd o'er his soul a few heroic rays.

Byron
here, like St Paul, elevates spirit above the soul on which it flashes.
The Ancient Greeks who went to the Olympics would not know what we were
talking about if we talked, like Byron, of ‘the spirit of old Greece’ or, as we have throughout the conference, of ‘the Olympic spirit’, for they had a different
vocabulary and a different theology from that of St Paul. But as we will see,
there are links between them.

I
find it very hard to know what the spirit of the original Olympic Games quite
was. We do not think of Games or athletics or competition as religious in
themselves but the Ancient Greeks did and St Paul and the ascetic tradition
picked up these ideas and transferred them to a life of heroic virtue and
ascesis leading to a crown of glory rather than to a victor’s laurel wreath
(Philippians). This indeed is what spiritual life— life according to the
spirit— is for Orthodox and Catholic tradition. The heroes of the Olympic Games
whose fame is sung by Pindar and whose physical beauty doubtless inspired the
sculpture of Phidias and Praxiteles are displaced by, and yet are the
prototypes of, the immortal beauty of the saints of the Church, those spiritual
athletes whose holy icons we see all around us in Greece.

Byron
was lame in one leg and would certainly have been excluded from the original
Olympic Games (his only chance of winning a wreath would have been as owner, or
even rider, in a chariot- race) and, of course, Byron was no saint either. How
then can we relate Byron to the Olympic Spirit? It has been the problem for all
of us in this Conference and yet perhaps we have not found it to be such a
problem after all.

Nietzsche
disliked the rather saccharin image of the Ancient Greeks as Enlightenment
goody goodies which had become not uncommon by the end of the eighteenth
century. Nietzsche insisted, on the contrary, that we could not understand the
Greeks unless we understood the importance to them of the concept of ‘eris’ or
‘strife’. It was strife between rival goddesses induced by the goddess Eris
herself that led to Paris’s choice of Aphrodite and so to the choice of Helen,
and so in turn to the nine-year strife of the Trojan War sung in the Iliad,
which led to the strife of Odysseus against Poseidon to return to Ithaca and to
conquer the suitors—the strife sung in the Odyssey—and to the strife arising
out of that other great returner from the Trojan war—Agamemnon whose murder and
its cycle of revenge led to Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Such strife is terrible but
the pulse of Ancient Greek Art and of that whole magnificent culture beats to
it. After all, Aeschylus entered his tragedies into a competition—a form of
eris—to win a prize in a kind of aesthetic Olympics. The Booker Prize for the
Best Novel of the Year is its diminished descendant. Nietzsche, rather
sneeringly, sets up this model of heroic and energetic culture in order to do
down that of Christianity which is founded on the Passion of the humble Christ
rather than on the action of heroes, and, I suppose, that he is partly right.
But if we read that great and founding text of Western culture, the Rule of Saint
Benedict, we find that Benedict talks of a both a bad and good zeal and that
his monks should strive to outdo one another in obedience and love. Zeal or
‘zelos’ was one of the retainers of Zeus. The phrase Benedict uses— ‘certatim
impendant’— derives from certatio, a word meaning to strive or combat as in a
battle or in an arena.

The
Olympic Games are parent both of Nietzsche’s idea of heroic strife as the
foundation of culture and also of the ascetic and ethical imperatives of Saint
Benedict whom Pope Paul VI declared patron of Europe. Olympia stands closer to Mount Athos than we might at first think. It is because the Games are, in a way, parent of
both these strands in European culture that we can find both of them in Lord
Byron. For the Games mediate between War and Peace and the values we attach
necessarily to both.

The
Olympic Games, most seem to agree, originated in practice for the arts of war.
And yet Games are not war and the condition of the early Olympics was a
declaration of peace throughout all Greek-speaking territories: a truce which
the modern Olympics is trying to revive. The Games mediated —in a manner which
is difficult for us to comprehend—between a humble religious acknowledgement of
the power and majesty of the Gods and a celebration of human beauty and spirit.
The gods do not play games amongst themselves though they occasionally
intervened in human ones. They do not need to. We need to because in Games, as
in Art, we momentarily enter a godlike space where the customary opposition between
order and freedom wholly disappears. As Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict
XVI, has recently observed in The Spirit of the Liturgy: ‘ play, though it has
a meaning, does not have a purpose’. In another way, despite the freedom which
they celebrate as their condition, the Games are rooted in a sense of the
holiness of a particular place and time (for the Greeks indeed measured their
time from the First Olympics) but they acknowledge a transcendent sense of the
luminosity of Being and a parallel, if shadowed, brightness in human beings;
for the Olympics are in some measure a showing of what the best amongst us
mortals can achieve in the sight of the Immortals in a space of freedom
comparable to theirs. The modern Olympics are mainly for the spectators but the
true spectators of the original Games were the gods themselves seeing and
delighting in a human best—and that best still lives as spirit in the words of
Pindar and the still surviving relics of that incomparable ancient sculpture.
It lives too in the words of Lord Byron.

Perhaps
the first thing to point to in the person and life of that very extraordinary
man, Lord Byron, is his capacity to mediate, to stand in the midst of
mediations of all kinds, and most especially perhaps, those between body and
spirit. We all know of his prowess at swimming, and boxing, and
pistol-shooting, and riding. They seem minor things to which biographers,
in their anxiety to make psychological guesses at Byron’s interior, do not pay
much attention, but they are not. It is these activities which provide a bridge
between the Byron the poet and Byron the hero. If we think of Byron sweeping
down on horseback in the late afternoon along the beach of the Venetian Lido
alone or with Shelley or some other companion, as he had done in Athens and was
to do here in Missolonghi too, then we should recall Shelley’s tribute to
Byron’s conversation as he rode and remember that he must have worked out on
those horse-rides the substance of what he was going to write (Don Juan for
instance) in the small hours of the morning later on. When he reviewed his
Suliotes in Missolonghi on horseback, the poet and the hero are one. Pindar
would have understood this but I am not sure that we do. In the same way, we
can understand Byron’s intense love of peace, his horror of the horrors of war
and yet his obvious delight in accounts of ancient and modern battles and his
identification with the Greek military cause and find no contradiction here if
we recall that Athena’s war-like stance and habitual helmet (the prototype of
the great helmet that Byron took to Greece with him) are not opposed to her
emblem and gift to men—the olive tree which is the emblem of peace.

I
have set up two terms. One is eris or strife. It is the face of the Olympic
Games which derives from and is still in close proximity with war and its
heroisms. Here we find Byron the hero. The other term is play. Following
Huizanga’s famous book Homo Ludens, let us call this ludus. It is the face of
the Olympic Games which links it to the reconciliation of order and freedom in
Art’s inherently self-sufficient playfulness. Here we find Byron the poet.
Curiously Art here comes close to worship or liturgeia which, as Romano
Guardini noted, has elements of play in it, and by this strange route we can
again understand, or almost so, the religious nature of the original Games. By
another paradox, ludus which involves freedom as its condition of operation,
links naturally with what the strife of Byron as a hero was directed
towards—freedom in general and especially the freedom of Hellas. Politics and
poetry share common ground. If we ask this conference’s question then about
Byron and the Olympic Spirit, we will find our answer in these two words, Greek
and Latin, from the East and from the West—eris and ludus.Let us begin
with eris and some words of Byron on Homer :

Next rose the martial Homer, Epic's prince,

And Fighting's been in fashion ever since; ( Hints from Horace,
679-80)

Byron
here burlesques the strife of heroes and its association with poetry from the
beginning but we know of course that this is only half the story. Byron liked a
good scrap. He did so out of the oppositional energies of his life-flow from
his earliest years but also out of his conscience and sense of justice. You can
hear both of these in these celebrated lines from Don Juan (IX, stanza 23,
185-89):

And I will war, at least in words
(and---should

My chance so happen---deeds) with all who
war

With Thought;---and of Thought's foes by far
most rude,

Tyrants and Sycophants have been and are.

I know not who may conquer:

Byron
says that he will war ‘in words (and should /My chance so happen—deeds)’. He
sees poetry itself sometimes as a sort of eris and within the arena of poetry
he often shows combats of various kinds—man against bull in Cadiz, man against
man in the Coliseum or in the battles that he necromantically conjures up in
Thrasimene, Ismael, and Corinth, and fictionally imagines in The Giaour and at
the end of Lara, or that he sees everywhere around him as Childe Harold travels
through the Spanish Peninsular at war. His poetical eris with Southey and with
Wordsworth, and his critical eris with Bowles over the status of Alexander
Pope, matches his political eris with Wellington and Castlereagh or even with
the Tsar of all the Russias whom he calls ‘the bald-coot bully Alexander’ (XIV,
83, 657). There is yet another kind of eris in the strife, albeit polite,
between the Archangel Michael and Lucifer for the soul of George III.

Byron
is intensely interested, too, in that other kind of strife which transforms
the Olympic games into the ascetic warfare of the spirit against daemons
and ‘cogitationes’. Byron puts both words together in his phrase ‘the demon
Thought’ in ‘Song to Inez’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I). Thus in Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage (III, 33-34 lines 296-301) he says:

'Tis Solitude should teach us how to die;

It hath no flatterers---Vanity can give

No hollow aid; alone---man with his God must
strive:

Or, it may be, with Demons, who impair

The strength of better thoughts, and seek
their prey

In melancholy bosoms---

Byron’s
Tasso, in his ‘Lament of Tasso’, is persecuted by a demon and of course Manfred
is the great spiritual athlete of the entire Romantic movement who has the
power to triumph over the demons who subdue Faust. Manfred is no Christian but
he is unintelligible if we have no sense of his kinship with the hermit whom
Byron describes in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (I 235-36):

More blest the life of godly Eremite,

Such as on lonely Athos may be seen

Manfred,
of course, does not lead a blessed life and kneels not to God for he says: (II
iv, 41-2)

I sunk before my vain despair, and knelt

To my own desolation.

Yet
would not one of those hermits who still live in Moses’s wilderness by the
ancient Orthodox monastery of St Catharine in the Sinai desert and climb the
mountain daily as a spiritual exercise, understand Manfred when he says(II,ii,
60-63):

with the thoughts of men,

held but slight communion; but instead,

My joy was in the wilderness,---to breathe

The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,

This
yearning to be tested in the wilderness or the holy mountain is spiritual eris
and Byron understands it more than most poets for, though ‘a citizen of the
World’, Byron too knows how to find his ‘joy in the wilderness.’ Manfred
describes himself as one who ‘champions human fears’. The word ‘champion’ means
one who fights in an arena. Manfred and spiritual athleticism may seem a long
way from the spirit of the Olympic Games but, if we understand the tradition of
spirit, they are not.

If
we turn from eris to ludus we might expect a simple opposition. But Byron is
rarely simple. We find the two vocabularies, and the two attitudes mixed
together in his poetic thinking. For example, when he describes the bull-fight,
which is after all an occasion of strife between man and beast, he says of the
bull (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage II, 823):

And now the Matadores around him play,

There
is undoubtedly bitterness in this sense of ludus carried into eris. Bitterer
still, of course, is the death of the gladiator in the Coliseum who, as he
dies, imagines his children in Dacia (Rumania) (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV,
1265-7):

There were his young barbarians all at play,

There was their Dacian mother---he, their
sire,

Butchered to make a Roman holiday.

His
children are in the freedom of play in his dying imagination whilst he himself
is dying in another involuntary game designed to entertain the Romans as a
holiday ludus. Byron is clearly making us bear the here unacceptable proximity
of ludus and eris. At times, he almost seems to come close to a not dissimilar
bitterness when he talks about his writing of Don Juan (XIV, 8,58-64):

"Fling up a straw, 'twill show the way the wind
blows";

And such a straw, borne on by human breath,

Is Poesy, according as the mind glows;

A paper kite, which flies 'twixt life and
death,

A shadow which the onward Soul behind throws:

And mine's a bubble not blown up for praise,

But just to play
with, as an infant plays.

Play
here is ambiguous—something delightful and revelatory but also something
trivialising. Later he broadens this into a larger sense of play and a larger
claim (XV, 473-80):

I say, in my slight way I may proceed

To play upon the surface of Humanity.

I write the world, nor care if the world
read,

At least for this I cannot spare its vanity.

My Muse hath bred, and still perhaps may
breed

More foes by this same scroll: when I began it, I

Thought that it might turn out so---now I
know it,

But still I am,
or was, a pretty poet. Stanza 60

A
witty and thoughtful stanza. Byron is a pretty poet who plays upon the surface
of humanity (for play knows only surfaces, that is why it delights us) but here
the implication is that humanity is no more than its surface and that if Byron
exposes this and thus does not spare the vanity of the world then ludus will
turn into eris since his writing will gain him ‘foes’ against whom he must
strive. Indeed he says that this is happening as he writes. ‘I write the world’
has here the eristic overtones of ‘I write things as they are and I don’t care
what you think about me’, in effect it means ‘I take on the world’.

If
we concluded here, we would get the emphasis wrong for the final point is that
in the midst of such strife Byron claims to be ‘a pretty poet’ and, of course,
that is exactly what he is. Ludus predominates over eris as it should, or
rather transforms it into itself as the Olympic Games do. He communicates a
relaxed mastery in his self-consciousness of the effects his writing is having
as he writes it (‘this same scroll’); this is the idiom of a champion; his
serious play upon the surface of humanity is vindicated by a different kind of
play—‘just to play with as an infant plays’. Byron is always in earnest but is
never earnest. Great art never is. It is games that teach us this indispensable
human art. Byron puts it like this (Don Juan 12, 95-96):

In play, there are two pleasures for
your choosing---

The one is winning, and the other losing.

Might
we call that ‘the Olympic spirit’? Perhaps not quite. Ancient athletes had an
intense desire to win and Pindar never praises those who come second. In poetry
too as in the life of spiritual asceticism, only the best will do—we celebrate
Homer or St John Climachus and we don’t hear of the runners-up. And Byron,
after all, never won a battle for the Greeks. He died unexpectedly in bed not
in the midst of strife. Missolonghi itself was, not long after his death,
ravaged and destroyed. And yet Napoleon was right: the sword is conquered by
the spirit and the pneuma of Lord Byron was and remains Olympian. Byron did not
fail the Greeks and the Greeks recognised their spirit in his spirit, in the
freedom which attached to Byron’s sense of play and to his sense of fair play,
that ineradicable striving for justice which promotes what the ancient Greeks
knew as eris agathon, a good strife— a version of Benedict’s zelus bonus or
‘good zeal’. Of Byron we can say using his own words: ‘something of the spirit
of Old Greece flash’d o’er his soul’. It is out of that intention to redirect
the energies of eris within the creative peace of ludus that the Modern Olympic
Games were reconstituted. It is good that we have held this conference on
‘Byron and the Olympic Spirit’ so close to the opening of the Olympics in Athens and I am honoured that you have invited me to give this lecture to it.